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Beatelectic is starting to look a little dated, we gave it a revamp a couple of years back, but the fact is it's a blogspot page, and in this day and age thats the equivalent of having your website up on geocities, with animated gifs of grim reaper skulls puking fire and popup ad's for cheap hotel rooms. All the new blogs I go to with the decent new electronic music on look like they were made by a team of trendy engineers with degrees in graphic design, then I come back to beatelectric and we look like shit. In reality I suppose to have had a blog this long hosted by google with direct mp3 links to unlicensed music is somewhat of a miracle, most got taken down due to copyright infringement complaints long ago, but I think its really a testament to the unpopularity of the under the radar dusty commercial failures that we post. And with that in mind, I'm about to post some private press Hi Nrg...

My apartment is on the corner of Castro and Market St in San Francisco, which has been the heart of the gay community here for decades, and as such when I go digging around my local thrift stores and yard sales I come up with endless San Francisco scene high energy and uptempo, euro disco. Not my genres of choice or expertise, but each to their own. A block either side of where I live were the homes of Megatone records, Moby Dick records, Hot Tracks records, some other labels and plenty of record stores specializing in dance music popular in the gay clubs at the time. Now and again, when searching around the 'hood something locally made that's a little outside of the norm shows up.

Sonny Padilla Jr.'s self released 1985 single is marked as coming out on Uno Records, the address of which is a few doors down the street from me, an old apartment complex, and probably the address of Sonny's living room office. It turns out that this record is actually well known and quite sort after on the digging circuit, fetching a couple of hundred bucks in mint condition, due to it's heavy utilization of the vocoder on the A side's It's Your Body, and as a rarity it makes it on to a lot of vocoder nerd's wants list. I actually prefer the instrumental of the B side, 'Talk To Me!', which doesn't appear to be on the internet anywhere.

In the sleeve notes Sonny states that the record was made at The Automatt, a well known studio which is now a parking lot on Fulsom St, the photo in this post was taken from the main room's mixing console. Sonny lived in San Francisco and worked in the music industry throughout his life before passing away in 2007, an obituary to him can be found here:

http://articles.sfgate.com/2007-11-30/news/17270905_1_memorial-tribute-naras-tv

Sonny Padilla Jr. - It's Your Body!
Sonny Padilla Jr. - It's Your Body! (Instrumental)
Sonny Padilla Jr. - Talk To Me!
Sonny Padilla Jr. - Talk To Me! (Instrumental)